Chapter VIII
Friendship usually creates onerous obligations. Our friends are inclined to become exigent and demanding. They learn to expect attentions from us and are hurt when we do not live up to these expectations. Friends have an unpleasant habit of weighing on our consciences, occupying too much of our time, and chiding us because we have failed them in some unimportant particular. Is it strange that there are moments when we hate them? Friendship, indeed, is as perilous a relationship as marriage; it, too, entails responsibility, that great god whose existence burdens our lives. Seemingly we never escape from his influence. Each newly contracted friendship brings another sacrifice to the altar of this very Christian divinity. But there was no responsibility connected with my friendship for Peter. That is why I liked him so much. When he went away, he seldom notified me of his departure; he never wrote letters, and, when he returned, I usually re-encountered him by accident. In the whole of our long acquaintance, there never was a period in which he expected me to telephone him after a decent interval. We were both free in our relationship, as free as it is possible for two people, who are fond of each other, to be. There was a great charm in this.
A whole month went by, after Edith Dale's party, without my hearing from him. Then I sought him out. By this time, I knew him well enough to be prepared for some transmutation; but I was scarcely prepared for what I saw. His room on East Broadway had been painted ivory-white. On the walls hung three or four pictures, one of Marsden Hartley's mountain series, a Chinese juggler in water colour by Charles Demuth, a Picabia, which ostensibly represented the mechanism of a locomotive, with real convex brass piston-rods protruding from the canvas, a chocolate grinder by Marcel Duchamp, and an early Picasso, depicting a very sick-looking pale green woman, lying naked in the gutter of a dank green street. There were lovely desks and tables, Adam and Louis XIV and François I, a chaise longue, banked with striated taffeta cushions, purple bowls filled with spiked, blue flowers, Bergamo and Oushak rugs, and books bound in gay Florentine wall-papers. The bed was covered with a Hungarian homespun linen spread, embroidered in gay worsteds. The sun poured through the window over George Moore's ample back and he looked happier.
Peter was wearing green trousers, a white silk shirt, a tie of Chinese blue brocade, clasped with a black opal, and a most ornate black Chinese dressing-gown, around the skirt of which a silver dragon chased his tail. He was combed and brushed and there was a faint odour of toilet-water. His nails were manicured and on one of his little fingers I observed a ring which I had never seen him wear before. Later, when I examined it more closely, it proved to be an amethyst intaglio, with Leda and the Swan for its subject. It has been said, perhaps too often, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It is even more true that you cannot make a sow's ear out of a silk purse.
I rose to the room: It's nicer than Edith's.
It's not bad, Peter admitted. I didn't get it fixed up at first. I like it better now, don't you?
I liked your friend, the other night, he continued.
You mean Edith?
Yes, you must take me there again.
I'm sorry but that is impossible. She has given up her apartment and returned to Florence. But, I added, I didn't know that you had talked together.